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Deep Dive: 10 Ideas from NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang
Every Sunday, our Deep Dives condense hours of research into 10 insights from the world’s best founders. Upgrade to Startup Archive Pro to read today’s full report.
Today we dive into 10 ideas from NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang:
How to attract the best talent in the world
Digital biology will be “one of the biggest revolutions ever”
Money is not a good reason to start a company
Why Jensen has 50 direct reports
Your job is to make a unique contribution
VCs don’t invest in business plans
AI applications and why “the next 10 years are going to be unbelievable”
Develop a tolerance for failure
Never talk about market share
Design your company from first principles
#1 How to attract the best talent in the world
“Our company chooses projects for one fundamental goal. My goal is to create an amazing environment for the best people in the world… [and] to create the conditions by which they will come and do their life’s work?”
As Jensen explains, the key to doing this is not by fighting for market share in commodity markets. It’s by choosing projects that are incredibly hard to do.
“[A great person] wakes up in the morning and says, I want to do something that has never been done before, that’s incredibly hard to do, that if successful, makes a great impact on the world.”
This is why NVIDIA doesn’t make cell phone chips, CPUs or do fabrication.
“We naturally selected ourselves out of commodity markets. And because we selected amazing markets and amazingly hard to do things, amazing people joined us… That’s how you build something special. Otherwise you’re only talking about market share.”
#2 Digital biology will be “one of the biggest revolutions ever”
“Where do I think the next amazing revolution is gong to come? And this is going to be flat out one of the biggest ones ever. There’s no question that digital biology is going to be it.”
Jensen continues:
“For the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science. When something becomes engineering, not science, it becomes less sporadic and exponentially improving. It can compound on the benefits of the previous years. And every researcher’s contributions compound on each other… We’re going to have incredible tools that bring the world of biology—which is very chaotic and constantly changing and diverse and complex—into the world of computer science. And that is going to be profound.”
He tells the student audience at Berkeley:
“If you happen to love this intersection, I think it’s going to be rich with opportunities. It’s going to be a giant industry.”
#3 Money is not a good reason to start a company
In the clip below, Jensen gives the following advice to a class of Stanford students:
“I hope that if I leave you with anything it’s that money is the only singular reason not to start a company because starting a company has a very low probability of success. And so if that is your reason for doing it, you will likely regret the experience.”
He continues:
“You should build a company because you believe in your idea, you’re passionate about it, and you want to build something great… You have to have a perspective that’s unique and that you feel really strongly about, so you’re willing to persevere almost any challenge to make it happen.”
Full video: Stanford Online “Jen-Hsun Huang: Stanford student and Entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA”
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